Rachel Schmidt

Women in the 1905 and 1916 Cervantes Centenary Activities

hen the liberal journalist Mariano de Cavia proposed that Spain celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of part one of Don Quixote, the activities were to serve as a cultural renewal, “un gran acto de resurgimiento español y de reanimación espiritual en esta tierra” (93). Largely conceived of as a response to the loss of the Spanish empire in the nineteenth century, the defeat in the War of 1898 with the United States, and a sense of general cultural embattlement vis-à-vis the Anglo-Saxon world, the 1905 centenary represented an attempt to bolster national pride and reestablish cultural ties with Latin America. Cavia described his image of the festival as a family reunion of all the nations who not only speak Spanish but who also “bear the blood” of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (93). Moreover, Cavia called for these noble men to defend the “Dulcinea patria” through commemorating Cervantes’s literary achievement. The journalist imagined the centenary, organized as a fraternal party for a Latin race (one descended from fictional characters, nonetheless), in these terms: “Una fiesta fraternal para todos los hombres que comulgan en el noble y laborioso culto de sentir hondo, pensar alto y hablar claro” (93). With these few phrases a vision of Latin manhood was set forth that would be repeated throughout the centenary discourse: one of deep sentiment, noble thought, and clear speaking. Such a characterization of the Latin or Spanish male can only exist in a nexus of social constructs, among them the Anglo-Saxon male and the Spanish female. In this article I will focus on the writings, images, and activities produced for the 1905 and 1916 Cervantine centenaries that propound concepts of Spanish womanhood. Whereas the cultural crisis of national identity occasioned by the loss of the War of 1898 has been widely discussed, the activities and cultural